Research Report

Quintek Technologies Inc. in Camarillo says Communications Capital Corp. has released a 17-page research report on the company, which provides investors with an outside view of Quintek's history, current status and growth potential. Communications Capital specializes in research, analysis, due diligence and reporting on small cap companies.

According to a new study released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, public libraries are thriving thanks to a core group of devotees who have qualities we don't usually associate with bookish people -- they are, generally speaking, more sociable and active people than those who don't go to libraries. The report , which surveyed more than 6,000 people over age 16, paints a somewhat surprising portrait of American library lovers. More than two-thirds of Americans are “actively engaged” with their public libraries.

Regulators approved a rule Friday aimed at eliminating conflicts of interest when Wall Street firms trade a company's stock before releasing a research report on the business. The Securities and Exchange Commission said the new rule, which applies primarily to the Nasdaq stock market, "will increase investor confidence in the integrity of research reports, thereby protecting investors and the public interest." In May, Nasdaq's parent organization, the National Assn.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Wall Street doesn't like Facebook's $19-billion deal to buy mobile messaging company WhatsApp. Shares slid about 2% to $66.68 in early trading Thursday, erasing a few billion dollars in market value. “The $19-billion price tag is an unfathomable price based on any near-term multiple,” said Macquarie Securities analyst Ben Schachter. As for the longer term? “We won't know for some time if the price paid actually looks more reasonable,” he said. The reaction from Wall Street echoes Facebook's $1-billion acquisition of photo-sharing service Instagram.

March 1, 1993 | THOMAS BRANDT, Thomas Brandt is director of communications for the National Commission on AIDS.

A report in early February by the prestigious National Research Council has ignited a firestorm among the nation's top specialists in AIDS policy, damaging friendships and turning respected colleagues into intellectual adversaries. Both sides agree that there was a failure of the communications process that filtered the complicated, 322-page report into news accounts.

Qualcomm Inc. on Friday defended its accounting practices after a research firm's report raising concerns about them sent the company's shares down to a 21/2-year low. "Qualcomm has the highest standards of corporate governance and accounting," said Anthony Thornley, chief financial officer of Qualcomm. "What obviously has happened here is that [the research firm] has extracted data [that has been] taken out of context and not presented in context," Thornley said.

United Parcel Service Inc. sold $4 billion of bonds in a three-part offering, according to Bloomberg News data. Proceeds from the debt sale will help fund the Atlanta-based package delivery company's withdrawal from the Central States pension fund, Lisa Jenkins, a Standard & Poor's analyst, wrote in a research report Thursday.

A large medical study has exonerated silicone breast implants as a cause of connective tissue diseases such as lupus and arthritis. Harvard researchers, reporting today in the New England Journal of Medicine, compared hundreds of nurses who had silicone gel-filled breast implants with nurses who did not and found that the rates of tissue diseases were virtually the same in both groups. "This study should reassure women with breast implants that they are not at substantially increased risk of connective tissue disease compared to other women," said Dr. Matthew Liang of Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, one of the co-authors of the research report.

After soaring for nearly two weeks, the price of common stock in ICN Pharmaceuticals and its subsidiaries plummeted in heavy trading Monday on Wall Street, spurred in part by press reports questioning the effectiveness of its mainstay product, the antiviral drug Virazole. The stock price of the Costa Mesa drug maker fell $6.25 to $21.75 a share Monday on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock was the second most active on the Big Board with more than 2.7 million shares traded.

The 401(k) system has led to deep financial woes for a generation of American workers, leaving most people with inadequate retirement savings and dreary prospects for their latter years, according to a new research report. The widespread adoption of 401(k) plans in the last three decades has benefited upper-income workers, providing them with a coveted tax break even as it has left them at the mercy of the volatile stock market, according to the analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.

Israeli cybersecurity researchers claim to have found a major hole in Samsung's Knox security software that leaves Galaxy S 4 devices used for enterprise and government work vulnerable to hackers. The reported security hole makes it possible for malware to intercept secure data, such as emails, on GS4 smartphones that are supposed to be protected by the Knox software, according to the Wall Street Journal . The Knox platform is designed so that users can keep their personal data on the same device as their sensitive, work-related data, which is protected separately by the Samsung security software.

The 401(k) system has led to deep financial woes for a generation of American workers, leaving most people with inadequate retirement savings and dreary prospects for their latter years, according to a new research report. The widespread adoption of 401(k) plans in the last three decades has benefited upper-income workers, providing them with a coveted tax break even as it has left them at the mercy of the volatile stock market, according to the analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.

In a finding likely to reignite debate over proposed new limits on abortion, British researchers have found that years ago, women who terminated a pregnancy increased their risk of giving birth prematurely in subsequent pregnancies, but that with modern procedures the danger has all but vanished. The researchers suggest the shift is the result of a growing use of oral medication to induce or aid in abortion, and a decline in surgical abortions that may injure a woman's cervix. The study looked at 732,719 first births by women in Scotland between 1980 and 2008 and found that during the early 1980s, women who'd had one abortion or more had a higher rate of preterm births during later pregnancies.

In terms of donations, arts and culture was Americans' fastest-growing charitable cause in 2012, rising an estimated 7.8% to $14.44 billion, according to a leading annual research report on charitable giving. Donations to education rose second-fastest, with a 7% gain, according to the latest edition of “Giving USA,” issued Tuesday by the Chicago-based Giving Institute and its research partner, the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University. Overall charitable giving totaled $316.2 billion, up 3.5% from 2011, the report said.

Long after learning that a troubling reading on a screening mammogram was just a false alarm, women continued suffering negative psychological effects, researchers in Denmark have reported. Six months after hearing they did not have breast cancer, women with these false positives experienced changes in "existential values" and "inner calmness" as great as for women who had cancer. They reported having more anxiety, feeling more pessimistic and having more problems with their sleep and sex lives - as well as other negative outcomes - than women who had normal mammograms.

High-altitude dust blown thousands of miles across the Pacific from Asian and African deserts can make it rain and snow in the Sierra Nevada, according to new research that suggests tiny particles from afar play a role in California's water supply. The study, published Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science, grew out of researchers' questions about two similar Sierra storms in winter 2009. Even though the storm systems carried the same amount of water vapor, one produced 40% more precipitation than the other.

WASHINGTON -- State regulators inspect oil and gas wells sporadically, do not consistently record violations, and impose light penalties on companies that are found to break environmental, health or safety rules, according to a new research report issued by the environmental watchdog group Earthworks. The report, “Breaking All the Rules,” comes out at a time when hydraulic fracturing -- known as "fracking" -- and horizontal drilling have touched off a nationwide boom in oil and gas production.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Wall Street doesn't like Facebook's $19-billion deal to buy mobile messaging company WhatsApp. Shares slid about 2% to $66.68 in early trading Thursday, erasing a few billion dollars in market value. “The $19-billion price tag is an unfathomable price based on any near-term multiple,” said Macquarie Securities analyst Ben Schachter. As for the longer term? “We won't know for some time if the price paid actually looks more reasonable,” he said. The reaction from Wall Street echoes Facebook's $1-billion acquisition of photo-sharing service Instagram.

Thanks to vaccination efforts, smallpox - killer of hundreds of millions people around the world over the course of the 20th century alone - was eradicated in 1979. But even today the lethal variola virus, which causes the disease, is not completely impossible to come by. A team of French and Russian researchers recently found new snippets of smallpox DNA in 300-year-old mummies from Siberia, according to an article in the New England Journal...

In June, a formerly healthy 60-year-old man was admitted to a hospital in Jidda, Saudi Arabia. He had been sick with a fever, cough and shortness of breath for several days; in the week that followed he developed severe pneumonia and renal failure. He died 11 days after his admission to the hospital. In a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine , researchers revealed more about the man's illness, which was caused by a previously unknown coronavirus called HCoV-EMC. Researchers isolated the virus from mucus the patient coughed up and they sequenced its genome, discovering that it was most closely related to coronaviruses found in bats.